Sir Walter Scott

by Andrew Lang

At this date, the winter of 1799, Scott met his school friend James Ballantyne, then publishing a newspaper at Kelso, and Ballantyne printed twelve copies of the new ballads. Scott liked the typography, thought of a small volume of the old Border ballads, to be executed by his friend, and the die was cast. The success of The Border Minstrelsy made him an author, association with the printer helped him on the long road to financial ruin.

BALLAD COLLECTING

The same date, December 1799, saw Scott made Sheriff Depute of Selkirkshire, “the Shirra of the Forest.” He at once invited Ballantyne to settle as a printer and publisher in Edinburgh, while in the Forest, when ballad hunting, he made the acquaintance of Leyden, scholar and poet, of William Laidlaw, his lifelong friend, and of James Hogg, then an Ettrick swain, “the most remarkable man who ever wore the maud of a shepherd.” Hogg had none of the education of Burns. “Self taught am I,” he might have said, like the minstrel of Odysseus, “but the Muse puts into my heart all manner of lays.” Hogg was indeed the survivor of such Borderers as, writes Bishop Lesley (1576), “make their own ballads of adventures for themselves.” He has left a graphic account of his first meeting with Scott. “Oh, lad, the Shirra’s come,” said Scott’s groom. “Are ye the chap that makes the auld ballads?” Hogg replied, “I could not say that I had made ony very auld ballads,” but did James tell the truth? He is under suspicion of having made the “very auld ballad” of Auld Maitland, which his mother at once chanted to the Shirra. Scott was as happy as his own Monkbarns, when he overheard Elspeth of the Burntfoot crooning the ballad of Harlaw. The old lady told the Shirra that she had learned Auld Maitland “frae auld Andrew Moor, and he learned it frae auld Baby Metlin” (Maitland) “wha was housekeeper to the first” (Anderson) “laird of Tushilaw. She was said to have been another than a gude ane....”

Baby Metlin having this character, I sought for her, aided by the kindness of the minister of Ettrick, in the records of the Kirk Session of Ettrick, hoping to find her under Church censure for some lawless love. But there is no documentary trace of Baby, and the question is, could Hogg, then ignorant of libraries, above all of the Maitland MSS., have forged the ballad of Auld Maitland, and made his mother an accomplice in the pious fraud? It is to be remarked that Scott himself says that he obtained Auld Maitland in manuscript, from a farmer (Laidlaw), and that the copy was derived from the recital of “an old shepherd” (1802). None the less Mrs. Hogg may also have recited it, having learned it from the old shepherd, Auld Andrew Moor. It is a delicate point in ballad criticism. Such a hoax, at this date, by the wily shepherd, appears to me to be impossible, and I lean to a theory that Auld Maitland, and The Outlaw Murray, are literary imitations of the ballad, compiled late in the seventeenth or early in the eighteenth century, on some Maitland and Murray traditions. In any case, Hogg had won the interest of Scott, whose temper he often tried but whose patience he never exhausted. For Leyden, a more trustworthy collector of ballads, Scott secured an appointment in the East, “a distant and a deadly shore.”

“LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL”

In 1802, the first two volumes of The Border Minstrelsy, later added to and emended, were published in London, with all the treasures of ancient lore in prefaces and notes; the first fruits, and noble fruits they are, of Scott as an historian and writer in prose. Ballantyne, still at Kelso, was the printer. Scott remarks that “I observed more strict fidelity concerning my originals,” than Bishop Percy had done. To what extent he altered and improved his originals cannot be known. He confesses to “conjectural emendations” in Kinmont Willie, which he found “much mangled by reciters.” Mr. Henderson credits him with verses ix-xii, “mainly,” and with “numerous other touches.” I do not think that in the ballad of Otterbourne he interpolated a passage bestowed on him by Mr. Henderson, for he twice quoted the lines in moments of great solemnity, and he was not the man to quote himself. The texts, though they passed the scrutiny of the fierce Ritson, are much more scientifically handled (with the aid of the Abbotsford and other MSS.) by Professor Child, in his noble collection. He notes over forty minute changes, in one ballad, from the MS. copy of Mrs. Brown. But The Border Minstrelsy gives the texts as the world knows them, as far as it does know them, while the prose elevates “a set of men whose worth was hardly known” to a pinnacle of romance. In their own days the Border riders were regarded as public nuisances by statesmen, who only attempted to educate them by the method of the gibbet. But now they were the delight of “fine ladies, contending who shall be the most extravagant in encomium.” A blessing on such fine ladies, who know what is good when they see it!

“LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL”

Scott says, with his usual acuteness, that we “sometimes impute that effect to the poet, which is produced by the recollections and associations which his verses excite.” When a man has been born in the centre of Scott’s sheriffdom, when every name of a place in the ballads and the Lay is dear and familiar to him, he cannot be the most impartial, though he may be not the least qualified critic of the poet, who, we must remember, wrote for his own people. By 1802, Scott announced to Ellis that he was engaged on “a long poem of my own ... a kind of romance of Border chivalry, in a light horseman sort of stanza.” This poem was The Lay of the Last Minstrel, which Borderers may be excused for thinking the best, the freshest, and the most spontaneous of all his romances in rhyme. The young Countess of Dalkeith (later, Duchess of Buccleuch) had heard from Mr. Beattie of Mickledale a story (known under another form, and as of recent date, in Glencoe) of a mysterious being who made his appearance at a farm house, and there resided. The being uttered the cry Tint, tint, tint! (Lost, lost, lost!), and was finally summoned away by a Voice calling to him by the name of Gilpin Horner. This legend was “universally credited”: Lady Dalkeith asked Scott to write a ballad on the theme, and thus Gilpin, though criticized as an excrescence on the Lay, was really its only begetter. While he was wondering what he could make of Gilpin, Scott heard part of Coleridge’s Christabel, then in manuscript, recited by Sir John Stoddart. The measure of Christabel had previously been used in comic verse, by Anthony Hall, Anstey, Wolcott and others, and Scott seems to have assumed the right to employ it in a serious work. In this he showed something of the deficient sense of meum and tuum which marked his freebooting ancestors; and Coleridge, whose fragment was not published till many years later, resented the appropriation and often spoke of Scott’s poetry with contempt. A year passed before Scott actually wrote the first stanzas of the Lay. He read them to Erskine and Cranstoun, who said little, and he burned his manuscript. But later he found that the critics were too much puzzled by the novelty of the poem to give an opinion, and when one of them, probably Erskine, suggested that an explanatory prologue was necessary, Scott introduced the Last Minstrel, chanting to Monmouth’s widow, and went on with the work, “at about the rate of a canto a week.”

In this casual manner he “found himself,” and his fame. The Lay was not published till 1805, and Scott’s energies were being given to an edition of the romance of Sir Tristrem, and to elucidating the true history of his favourite Thomas the Rymer, of Ercildoune. In later days he purchased The Rymer’s Glen, so he chose to style it, below Eildon tree, with the burn which murmurs by the cottage of Chiefswood. But Sir Tristrem and the Rymer were learned and unprofitable subjects. Despite his need of money, Sir Walter was always ready to spend his time and labour in literature which profited not, financially. “People may say this or that of the pleasure or fame or profit as a motive of writing,” he remarks. “I think the only pleasure is the actual exertion and research....”

Society and his duties as Quartermaster-General of Volunteer horse were combined with research and composition. Invasion seemed imminent, and Scott worked both at his cavalry drill and at organizing the infantry militia of his sheriffdom. In September 1803 he met Wordsworth and his sister on their Scottish tour, when Wordsworth prayed for “an hour of that Dundee” who drove the army of Mackay in rout through the pass of Killiecrankie. It is curious to find Wordsworth, Ruskin and Scott united among the friends of Claverhouse! Wordsworth professed himself “greatly delighted” by Scott’s recitation of four cantos of the Lay, though “the moving incident is not my trade,” any more than admiration of contemporaries was Wordsworth’s foible. Later the admiration was mainly on the side of Scott, though Wordsworth made noble amends in his beautiful sonnet on Scott’s final and fated voyage to Italy.